To flesh out what he means by paying attention, Buechner gives a couple of examples from his own life. He describes feeding his neighbour’s sheep on Christmas Eve, noticing the manger and realising “The whole world is a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again and again.” It’s a passage that’s well worth reading. He then offers this story of his family catching a glimpse of the “peace of God” at SeaWorld…
“There’s one other anecdote that illuminates this somehow. My wife, Judy, and our youngest daughter, Sharman, and I went to SeaWorld in San Antonio one day. It’s one of those great big aquatic jamborees, full of hoopla and hokum, and T-shirts and loud music and frozen bananas dipped in chocolate and all that, but don’t knock it because the main attraction is something that everybody should see. Well, the main attraction, I am sure you know, is you sit in the stands and there before you is a huge tank of crystal clear, turquoise-colored water in front of a big platform on which stand these beautiful young women and handsome young men in bathing suits, and then at a signal, out come these creatures of such beauty. There is no describing them. They call them killer whales. (Why killer? I wonder what they call us . . .) These great big creatures are cousins of ours, these mammals of pearl gray, indescribably beautiful that swim at enormous rates through crystal clear water and jump through hoops that the young people hold for them, and the sun shines and the sky is blue and it is just unbelievable. As I watched it, I found tears streaking down my cheeks, and ah!—I was embarrassed by them. I’m a neurotic man a hundred ways to Sunday, but I thought, here I am crying at this marvelous thing. And I turned to my wife and daughter and they also had tears in their eyes. We were crying because we caught a glimpse of the peace of God when man and beast and sun and water and hope were all somehow dancing together in this wonderful dance. We caught a glimpse of Eden, of the way things were supposed to be.
“So loving God means, as Jesus says, consider the lilies of the field. Consider SeaWorld. Consider feeding your neighbor’s sheep on Christmas Eve and loving each other. Jesus says, Love the Lord thy God with thy heart and soul and strength, and also your neighbor. And that is the same thing.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp38-39.
To help you reflect…
When have you caught a glimpse of the peace of God? When have you caught a glimpse of Eden - the way things were supposed to be?
